Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move,
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Vergissmeinnicht by Keith Douglas (1920-1944) is a poem that continually shakes and rebuilds its own lyric foundations. It’s narrated by a British soldier in the second world war, perhaps a tank commander, as Douglas was, whose unit is returning three weeks later to the scene of a battle to recover the spoils.

The body of the German soldier is discovered in a line that, ironically, always reminds me of the opening of Wilfred Owen’s 1918 poem Futility (“Move him into the sun …”). But Douglas instantly fights off any such nostalgic softening of the scene. The diction is tough and plain. The verse jolts along with the disturbed rhythm and auditory clunk (“gone”, “gone”, “ground”, “found”, “found”) of a tank over rough terrain. A new reader might expect from the first line that Douglas has planned a poem, or at least a stanza, in trochaic pentameter, an illusion soon dispelled by the subsequent choppy tetrameters. There’s no hovering withdrawal, no peaceful sleep to be construed from the scene of “the soldier sprawling in the sun”.

Still in stanza two the rhymes play around with the assonance set up earlier. There’s a looming non-sentence beginning “The frowning barrel of his gun” and rhythmic security shaken by the five syllables of “overshadowing”. As the narrator looks back to “that day” he remembers “he hit my tank with one / like the entry of a demon”. “One” is probably the slang euphemism for a round of fire.

So now we know that the narrator has narrowly avoided being killed by the dead German. He changes the subject almost at once, diverts attention with the injunction, “Look”. We follow his stare into the shallow grave of the abandoned weapons, “the gunpit spoil”, and see the “dishonoured picture” of Steffi, the dead man’s girlfriend. “Dishonoured” is a fine word-choice: it “translates” an idea of the sexual mistreatment of women into a new context: war is the agent of her dishonour.

“Vergissmeinnicht” in German means the flower “forget-me-not” – it implies the request “forget me not”” (“vergiss mich nicht”) but it’s the flower which conveys the message. Impending pathos remains under the control of clear-eyed observation. There’s a new rhyme-scheme for this quatrain, awkward and effective at the same time. The beauty of the last two lines owes much to the use of the plain word “put”: anything more precise – “written”, say – would sound pedantic.

Resuming the first-person plural pronoun in stanza four, Douglas bats away notions of chivalry, except, perhaps, in the hesitation of “almost” in the opening line, “We see him almost with content …” The image of “his own equipment / that’s hard and good when he’s decayed” brings us, after a fresh moment of pathos in the image of a weeping Steffi, to the terse details of the decay. Those three lines noting his fly-black skin, “paper eye” and “burst stomach like a cave” are both spare and grim. The poet doesn’t let himself look away, but doesn’t exalt in the grimness, either.

It would be difficult to imagine, watching the poem as a work in progress, how Douglas could bring it to a close. I’ve sometimes wondered if he draws a little too near to sweetening the anguish, but I always have to reject that idea. Withdrawal from the danger-word, “mingled”, is achieved by the rhyme: “singled” comes as a pertinent surprise, as if death were another soldier who has fixed the soldier in his sights and accurately dispatched him. The “frowning barrel” of the gun still casts its long shadow. Douglas’s unsurprising revelation that “the lover and killer” are inhabitants of one body sustains the poem’s balanced realism, and allows the speaker his more emotional recognition of the lover’s “mortal hurt”.